The Road Back

A few weeks after the event I went to Ground Zero.  I will never forget the smell.   They were still spraying a building trying to get the smothering metal under control.   I remember seeing a large building that was totally destroyed, a mess, blown out windows, the structure was a calamity.   

I did not have a camera, I knew better, there was a couple that walked near me that did.   The people that guarded the site, not officials, just people that were there would shout out, “No Pictures.”  “No Camera’s.”  

 There was World Trade Center dust all over.  It had been a while and I thought it would be gone but the dust was still there.   I passed St Peters church, I had seen it on TV, dust was all over the church yard, I think more intense there than in the street because it was a ground no one walked on or drove on.   The church had an ancient rod iron fence and parts of papers were still entangled there, the papers I’d seen all over the TV. 

I remember walking by parking garages and cars inside were covered in dust, cars no one ever came for because they parked, they walked to work, and they never came back.  It made me think what if that happened to me, what if I hid a joint in the ashtray or something I would never want anyone to know I had.   The secret life, secret stuff that I would never tell anyone I had but I never came back, what then? Did an auto body shop tow the cars, then when no one claimed it did they empty it out and just throw away all that secret stuff?  Did they even know it was a secret?  They didn’t, it just got thrown away or if it was worth something it was pocketed. 

The cars left behind from the people that died hit me that way.  The smell hit me another way.  I was only there for a few hours and it physically took me days to get over that smell.   People were working there all day, every day.  I knew they would be sick and I am sure they knew but it was their city.  It was their job.  If being who they were killed them they did not care.  There was not a choice. 

 I remember seeing those pillars. The ones people said were crosses.  I learned someone I knew worked in the city that day and had to walk out over a bridge (Brooklyn?) with everyone else to get out.  She never went back.   A lot of people couldn’t either.   

 New York was in recovery.  There were some, very few, businesses open when I was there then  but I did see a light on (battery?) and some people inside.   Not the New York that it was but it was already finding it’s way back even though it was still burning.